Sayfullo Saipov’s Halloween attack in New York City was a realization of a growing concern among U.S. counterterrorism officials.

Years before the 29-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan plowed a rented Home Depot pickup truck through a bike lane in Lower Manhattan, killing eight people in an apparent ISIS-inspired attack, the FBI had begun to target Uzbek immigrants in the United States with digital surveillance, as well as undercover informants.

Those domestic investigations, spurred in part by intelligence reports that showed Uzbek fighters joining the Islamic State in Syria and elsewhere, suggested there was a small, tight-knit community of Uzbeks in the U.S. who were drawn to violent extremism. But although this week’s attack has led President Donald Trump to call for additional immigration restrictions, the history of terror attacks in the United States shows it’s hard to generalize based on nationality.

Federal prosecutors charged Saipov with terrorism-related offenses today. The FBI is searching for information about a second Uzbek man, Mukhammadzoir Kadirov, possibly in connection with the attack.

The FBI has acknowledged that Saipov, who drove trucks for a living and reportedly embraced extremism after arriving in the U.S. in 2010, was known to federal agents as a result of his contact with another Uzbek man who was under investigation for links to terrorism in New York. It’s not uncommon for FBI agents to conduct so-called threat assessments — limited investigations to determine whether someone could be a national security concern — when someone is found to associate with the target of FBI counterterrorism investigations. For example, the FBI conducted a threat assessment of Omar Mateen, the ISIS-inspired attacker in the 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando, when agents learned that he knew Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, a Florida man who joined Nusra Front and became the first American suicide bomber in Syria.

The most significant FBI investigation of Uzbeks in the U.S. involved a group of five Uzbeks and a sixth man from Kazakhstan who were living in Brooklyn and trying to help each other travel to Syria to join ISIS. Given its location in New York, this seems the most likely of the publicly disclosed FBI investigations to have resulted in an assessment of Saipov.

The case of the Brooklyn Uzbeks involved a 30-year-old entrepreneur named Abror Habibov, who operated kiosks that sold kitchenware and repaired mobile phones in malls in Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. One of the Uzbek men that Habibov employed, Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, had visited an Uzbek-language online forum in August 2014 and asked how he and some friends could join ISIS without being in Syria or Iraq.

“We too wanted to pledge our allegiance and commit ourselves while not present there,” he wrote. “I am in USA now but we don’t have any arms. But is it possible to commit ourselves as dedicated martyrs anyway while here? What I’m saying is, to shoot Obama and then get shot ourselves, will it do? That will strike fear in the hearts of infidels.”

The FBI identified Juraboev through his internet protocol address, and agents went to his home. Juraboev spoke to the agents, according to an FBI affidavit, and did not hide his interests in joining ISIS. He acknowledged that he wrote the post on the Uzbek-language forum and said he would try to kill Obama if ordered to do so by ISIS. Juraboev reiterated what he said in a statement he wrote in Uzbek and provided to the FBI. He also told agents that a friend from Kazakhstan, Akhror Saidakhmetov, wanted to join ISIS as well.

The FBI then began to monitor Juraboev’s and Saidakhmetov’s communications, discovering that they were making concerted efforts to contact people who could help them cross from Turkey into Syria.

In September 2014, a month after Juraboev’s meeting with the FBI, federal agents introduced a paid undercover informant, who approached Juraboev at his Brooklyn mosque. The informant encouraged Juraboev and Saidakhmetov to travel to Syria. With money Juraboev earned from working at Habibov’s mall kiosks, and with a promise from Habibov that he would provide more money for transportation to Syria, Saidakhmetov bought airplane tickets for Juraboev and himself. Habibov waited outside the travel agency as the tickets were purchased, according to the FBI’s criminal affidavit.

The arrests of Juraboev, Saidakhmetov, and Habibov also led to the apprehension of two additional Uzbeks who had provided money for the trip to Syria, revealing a small network in Brooklyn that was interested in supporting ISIS.

Meanwhile, across the country, the FBI also investigated two Uzbeks who were remarkably similar to Saipov: They both drove trucks for a living and reportedly drifted to extremism after their arrival in the United States.

Fazliddin Kurbanov came to the U.S. as a refugee from Uzebekistan in 2009 and resettled in Boise, Idaho. When Kurbanov was young, his parents converted to Christianity and faced persecution in Uzbekistan, but Kurbanov became a Muslim again once in the U.S. Kurbanov was charged with terrorism for discussing the possibility of raising money for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and talking about a bomb attack with an FBI informant. At the time of his arrest, FBI agents found bomb-making material in his home. (The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose mission is to overthrow the nation’s secular government, has reportedly fractured, with some members aligned with Al Qaeda and others with ISIS.)

Jamshid Muhtorov, an Uzbek living in Colorado, allegedly swore allegiance to the Islamic Jihad Union, an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan splinter group, and was arrested after attempting to board a flight to Turkey. Bakhtiyor Jumaev, an Uzbek friend of Muhtorov’s who was living in Philadelphia, was also arrested for trying to join the Islamic Jihad Union. In Muhtorov’s case, the FBI was so alarmed that it requested NSA surveillance of his digital communications.

The FBI’s concern with and recent arrests of Uzbeks has not been reflected in immigration policy. Trump used this week’s attack to call for more “extreme vetting” and “merit-based” visas, but the administration’s orders on immigration have not focused on Uzbekistan. None of the iterations of Trump’s travel ban included the country, and in fact, following the ban, Uzbekistan was among the Muslim-majority nations that saw an increase in travel visas to the U.S.

When he was a U.S. senator, Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to justify what would become Trump’s ban by analyzing the country of origin of previous terrorism defendants. He assigned the staff of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which he chaired at the time, to research the country of the origin and immigration status of all terrorism defendants on a Justice Department list that ended in 2014. At the time that list was created, only one defendant — the man in Alabama who bought an assault rifles from an undercover agent — was from Uzbekistan.

Top photo: Federal authorities search an apartment in Boise, Idaho, on Cassia Drive on Thursday afternoon, May 16, 2013. U.S. authorities in Idaho said they have arrested a man from Uzbekistan accused of conspiring with a designated terrorist organization in his home country and helping scheme to use a weapon of mass destruction. Fazliddin Kurbanov, 30, was arrested at an apartment complex in south Boise on Thursday morning after a grand jury issued a three-count indictment as part of an investigation into his activities in Idaho and Utah.

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I’m still waiting for gun control advocates to come out and condemn Home Depot trucks for killing 8 people and call for more restrictions on them.

It’s probably because all trucks are already registered and all drivers licensed. So, I guess gun control advocates should demand this style of truck be removed from the US because it is apparent that these sort of trucks can cause mass murder.

Yep, blaming inanimate objects is always the way to combat criminal activities.

I guess an alternative could be to mandate the companies that make truck like the Home Depot truck used to kill 8 persons to be able to only travel at speeds of 15mph. This would would ensure that deaths could be reduced.

The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) maintains a hit-list of over two-million individuals, mostly Arabs, Muslims, and American political dissidents, who are persecuted and assassinated.

As part of FISA the New York City Police Department (NYPD) twice in six months broke-down the door of my mid-town Manhattan apartment, and conducted warrantless raids.

My complaints to New York City Mayor William de Blasio, Police Commissioner William Bratton, District Attorney Cyrus Vance, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, and the Civilian Complaint Review Board were ignored.

Lawyers and news groups that I contacted such as The New York Times ran away at the mention of FISA.

Trump’s plan for “super-duper-hyper-extreme-ultimate-vetting” is probably going to be stupid and dangerous. It reminds me enough of the hyper-sinister [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion Chinese mandatory social rating] that I suspect the same company will be doing both in the end.

That said, the Democrats’ brilliant idea of a visa lottery for people from countries where they know people don’t really want to come to America is something I *know* is stupid and dangerous. I mean, I’ve just had people telling me for the past six months we can’t discriminate by country of origin, doesn’t matter if they execute people for saying “democracy” or cut off heads as a mode of justice. Then I find out we had a preferential system to let people from Uzbekistan run past the usual standards only because their people don’t want to come here much. (I assume that has nothing to do with being 79% Muslim)

Well, I have a better idea! How about we set up a lottery system to invite a larger proportion of the yearly immigration quota from Namibia, which is accumulating a reputation for having the freest press in Africa, a democracy? (I assume that has absolutely nothing to do with them being 80-90% Christian and less than 0.05% Muslim…) I mean, if America wants a program to pick and choose immigrant sources — let’s choose sources that we want! Base it all on fundamental freedoms and democratic principles.

Those who believe Islam is a religion just like any other have to believe that this could benefit Muslim countries just as much as any other, since they are just as capable of being free and democratic as anybody … right?

Very good piece. I wish we had more media coverage, mains streams and otherwise so the immigrant community becomes more involved helping the DoJ identify and intercept radicalized individuals. I’m not calling for witch hunts, just a partnership that protects us all, the immigrant community (from profiled oppression) most of all.

I am waiting for one of the Intercept fake news agents coming up with their standard story that FBI agents trapped Saipov and provided him with fake guns in order to trap him, but that this guy instead did the damage with his truck at a time when he was not being monitored.

Most importantly, once again the suspect was “known to the police”. This has been the case going all the way back to Mohammed Atta in 2001. The government knows who these people are and allows them to go ahead with attacks to justify increased police powers and spying.

The US sucks people out of Uzbekistan because it has the globes fourth largest gold reserves, tenth in copper, twelfth In URANIUM! Does that explain it for you. Now we can pre-empt war and seize!Wake up! This is the plan to bring in terrorists to rile things up.

The FBI then began to monitor Juraboev’s and Saidakhmetov’s communications, discovering that they were making concerted efforts to contact people who could help them cross from Turkey into Syria.

The FBI “then” began to monitor their communications? “then”? Let me fix that for you:

The FBI then looked into all the data (from their whereabouts with centimetric precision, their medical records, all they have ever said online, over the phone and in their private homes to all they have ever bought using a credit card, their eating and sh!tting habits, …) kept by the NSA, by themselves and all other 15 “intelligence” agencies about all citizen pretty much in the whole world from Angela Merkel to the Tsarnaev brothers, your granparents and children in Zeitgeistable, cross correlated corpora, which seem to be very helpful to them in order to justify funds and salaries from tax money supporting the most profitable business sector right not in police state U.S.A. and “making sense of things”, finding ways of rationalizing always after the fact “stories”. Those data repositories seem to be very good as well while instilling grandiose intellectual ideas about using AI for cybernetic social control, but they haven’t stopped any by-us-unapproved “terrorist” attack, nor have they made us any smarter, it seems (provided they could see that themselves).

I know, I know; you can’t put it like that. You need a job like any one else of us.

So we should not profile on Nationality or Religion or Colour of the skin to evaluate the risk of terror potential. Instead we should concentrate on everybody who use the internet and cellphones as potential terrorists. Welcome to the real world of intelligence agencies……. and still terror attacks happen.
The only effective solution would be to implant a control chip in every living human and every newborn to eradicate present and future bad behaviour.

If you’re thinking of that idea, I’m pretty sure an intel agency out there has tried to make it law. And, it wouldn’t be hard to convince Americans to go down this route.

They just need to frame a poll in a certain manner, then, throw it up as proof the majority agrees. As for the courts, in society, there will always be enough willing participants ready to recreate laws despite the constitution.

The comments are definitely interesting – each so far is an unhinged conspiracy theory that attempts to put the blame back on America for these violent acts. For some people its the intelligence community deliberately creating the terrorists, some its “cybernetic social control”, some people its the same old US naked imperialism that makes people come here to kill innocent civilians.

What I always find weird is that these people never argue with one another – they are all in their own ecosystem of conspiracy, rarely interacting with other conspiracists…..all they want to do is argue with the prevailing wisdom.

“They both drove trucks for a living and reportedly drifted to extremism after their arrival in the United States.”

These guys don’t just “drift,” into extreme behavior, Trevor- they are pushed and provoked, and put into little internet boxes at Fusion Centers, where their internet/ cell phones take on a life of its own, as hidden internet operators from the Five Eyes target their phones and computers with total crap, malware, and spywarez.

Most famously, the Louisiana shooter noted that his internet searches redirected to a well known web page “When Should You shoot a Cop,” written by the well known chronicler of police abuse and corruption, Copblock.

Then, he got so worked up over his constant harassment that he actually DID that.

Then there’s the community policing, where all the “good people” stalk these guys, and tail them in cars; or enter their homes and yards and move stuff around; or shine spotlights into their windows for YEARS without end to cause them fear and anxiety.

And of course, they get the weird, occasional “street theater”and sometimes, the things they look at on the internet get repeated back to them over their phones-but just enough o let them know that they are watched-and harassed; and that there is nothing they can do about it.

It’s been called a “perfect crime” for this very reason-very hard to prove, even harder to validate in ‘official narratives.’ Who do you call when its the “good guys” doing it-and they let you know that it is them?

They are mocking targeted individuals, who do not have the financial or political power to prove the relationship between this form of harassment, or to sue these bastards who do this crap.

This sort of stuff is pure police psychological sadism in action. And, this is why many online call them cowards-and many of these manufactured terrorists go trough this crap endlessly, in a variety of forms.

You will find many good videos of ordinary morons who are targeted with this exact harassment buried in the “chatter” of the general gang stalking military disinformation milieu.

What they are doing is messing with people full time, most likely from Fusion Centers, with CIA trained advisers. And it is well documented that the DHS is involved at every level.

This is just one of the thousands of ways that they hijack and redirect these guys and “drive” them in classic operand conditioning scenarios.

Then, there are the “netcuts” where their internet is redirected and cut, then switched to “fake Google, or even Yahoo (for real.)

Then, there is the targeted advertisements that operate EXACTLY as the old “25th frame” video brainwashing.

It was long a tactic of the Israeli Mossad counter-intel and border police to create terrorists out of young boys by bullying them mercilessly, and a well known psychological operation that tips the pyramid of Abraham Maslow on its head.

But organized gang stalking is a very real tactic of creating terrorists.